


Second City

by Glinda



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Depression, F/M, Glasgow, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-22
Updated: 2013-07-22
Packaged: 2017-12-21 01:21:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/894115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A city hard, a city proud, a city that calls Dr Walid home even after all these years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second City

**Author's Note:**

> One of my favourite things about the book was the questions it raised about the rivers of other cities, and what might lie in their depth. Makes it perfect of writing fanfic about too, because if you don't know London well enough, you can just write about the mythologies of your own city. And well there's that line that the spirit of Riot and Rebellion has at the end of Rivers of London describing Dr Walid as 'the Scottish Mohammedan' and I couldn't resist making him Glaswegian. And I wondered how a Gastroenterologist ended up becoming a cryptopathologist and set out to write the story, and ended up with the unrequited romance between a medical professional and a river goddess. Someone still ought to write that (before Ben Aaronovitch josses me completely) but for now, here's a brief history of the Rivers of Glasgow.

It's a bright spring day in Glasgow, and as such Abdul Walid tucks his scarf snug around his neck and double-checks that his finger-less gloves are safely in his pocket for later. He's not sure whether its the years in London, or merely the passage of time that has robbed him of his youthful waterproofness but when his mother tucks a brolly in his pocket he pretends not to notice. It's a Saturday and he's in Glasgow so that means football, there's a match later – and here the red and yellow tartan of his scarf has meaning, beyond the casual ex-pat jokes about 'the only team in Glasgow', here it means pride, belonging and acceptance – two sets of thistles will face off and while victory might be sweet it isn't essential. Just standing in the crowd at Firhill again will be enough, and when it isn't he knows he'll be lost to London completely. First though, he's away for a dander through old stomping grounds and lunch with a very old friend. 

It was a bright spring day like this one, sitting in a lecture theatre a stone's throw away at the medical school, when a particular lecturer started talking and cut through the fug of sleep deprivation, doubt and unwilling hangover to capture his imagination and set him on his path to specialism in Gastroenterology. It would be months later that the darkness descended, and he would take the first steps down the road that would see him become an authority on cryptopathology. He doesn't remember what triggered it, only that a dull ache that settled in his heart, turning the greens of Kelvingrove park perpetual grey and the changing light seemed to stick at oppressive slanting white light that never seemed to properly brighten the day. When the broken shards of his fellow students shattered faiths, started to make a thousand tiny cuts into his skin and his own faith. 

There’s a woman waiting on the bridge, Kamala Kelvin is waiting for him as she has so many times before, with no less patience for all the years that have passed. Time has been kinder to her than to him, but her face still lights up at the sight of him approaching. It was her that had led him, not so much out of the darkness that had engulfed him that long ago winter, but rather through it. She’d taken his hand one day and led him beyond the darkness inside his head into the face of the darkness and bright deadly beauty of the other older world that lurked just beneath the surface of the Glasgow he knew. A world like the one he lived on the outskirts of back in London, if somewhat less Byzantine. 

Her accent slides and mutates over time and throughout conversation, mostly it is pure Glasgow the way his once was, but there are inflections, as much Urdu and Cantonese as West Highland and Irish. These days there are odd Polish words in her vocabulary but when he points that out, she tosses her head and tells him they were there all along, just fell out of use with the Italian and Yiddish and Nors, have fallen back into use just as the Kiswahili has. 

Mother Glasgow he calls her, and while she laughs at it, she takes it as her due. She is a river goddess and she doesn't much care for the religious persuasions or the shades of skin that of those that worship or live on her shores. She welcomes them all with open arms and tries to keep them from falling into them in the first place best she can. 

(Not the oldest of the river gods and goddesses of Glasgow, a sprawl of unruly siblings that she and her brother Clyde – dark hair and vivid blue eyes, pale freckled skin, he remembers the days when the Picts and Celts put aside their differences to form a new country – mostly ride herd upon. They in turn defer to a tiny old lady who has no interest in power or politics, and when Abdul met her – sitting under the Bridge of Sighs outside the Necropolis - seemed the opposite of a goddess. Molendinar is bent, crooked and filthy, like the polluted burn from which she takes her name, the burn that played host to the first settlement, and powered the mills that saw it grow into a great city. The burn is polluted and built over, and if you don’t know where to look you’d never find it or think it worthy of a goddess of its own. And somewhere among the back alleys with the burn flowing below there’s a hostel where if you ask for ‘Molly Dinar’ you’ll be given shelter, there’s always room at the inn, though the landlady is never in. Wandering the streets and telling old stories round makeshift fires and huddled in shop doorways, she keeps company with those who have fallen through the cracks. Those who are beyond even seeking Kelvin’s embrace are Molendinar’s to care for, and Abdul would swear he’s seen Big Issue sellers in more cities than this one wearing her Sigel. She was the first to offer Kentigern shelter and it’s a habit she’s never been able to shake, even if their dear green place is long gone.) 

Kelvin’s sari is made of some rich and opulent material, shining and shimmering in shades of green and blue, changing with the light. And arguably with the perspective of the person looking at her. If he looks carefully he thinks he can see intertwined letters picked out in gold embroidery, alongside shamrocks and defiant fists, but he once caught sight of her at a football match, on a Saturday long ago and her knows her scarf of choice matches his. 

He knows the followers of Neath and Leven will be out in other cities, leaving their trails of carnage behind them in whatever towns had the misfortune to host their beloved teams tonight. The Cart siblings however, are at home, fighting their long and no less bitter or pointless wars in the suburbs and estates. But walking by the Kelvin, at the side of the goddess of that very river, he could stay out all night and see no trouble. Tonight she will leave the trouble to Clyde, and with a wry smile she tells Abdul that the starlings’ troubles are for Father Glasgow to worry about, Mother is busy. It's a lie, he knows, within the grounds of Kelvingrove Park at least there will be spontaneous outbreaks of camaraderie, lust and unlikely friendship. Off-duty lifeguards will rescue stumbling drunks and find life-long friends, old lovers will reconcile and jilted brides will find new love with cuckolded old romantics. Kelvin was a lost soul herself once, a hundred years before, the first of her kin to be born in Scotland, caught between two worlds, preferring to drown than be parted from the grey skies and green water of the only home she'd ever known. She is convincing because she has stood where they stand, known that despair and longed for a voice like hers to comfort her – they don't always listen but she always speaks, her succour is perpetual after all. He remembers how welcome her words were to him all those years before and one day he will help her catch them before they fall. 

(This part of the city is sinking, built on old mine workings, slowly slipping sideways. One day they'll lose the battle and slide into the Kelvin. She does her best to keep it from happening, but when it does she will open her arms to all those souls and welcome them as a long overdue sacrifice, even while it breaks her heart.)

Abdul doesn’t know if it’s a perk of being the beau of a river goddess, or if it’s a gift that Clyde extends to all his starlings however far away they fly, that he just notices because Kelvin has opened his eyes to certain things. He feels it though, sometimes, rising up in his bones steadying his feet when he might stumble, strengthening his resolve when he might back down. All he knows is that there are days when the city that he’s made his home these last thirty years brings him down, and on those days he always finds kind stranger to remind him of the oddities and charms of the place. That it’s a city of the perpetually displaced, of wanderers looking for a place to call home, or just biding time until they can afford to return there. In the old Sikh gentleman, beard as white as his turban, singing about trying to catch a fish that coudnae swim, in the homesick drunken wee lassies letting him talk them into a taxi home instead of getting into another fight, in the way a thug twice his size, pushing something vile and addictive, recoils and deflates at his tone. He’s needed in London, a reluctant emissary on a mission that is no clearer to him now after all this time. 

His mother has almost forgiven him for never marrying, his brothers have given her hoards of grandchildren and she is fiercely proud of his career. There's only been one girl he thought of marrying and, well, he couldn't break his mother's heart like that. Every time he comes home she's frailer, her life stretched thinner and thinner. He hates that his work means he can't be wilfully blind to it. For all the horrors and terrors of his work, there is much of the other world that he works on the edge of that he wishes he could show her. Of everyone he knows, here or in London, his mother is the one person who would most appreciate and understand the River Gods and Goddesses. One day he will go swimming with Kelvin, not yet but soon, he can wait a little longer, and she's patient in ways her siblings don't always understand. In the meantime they talk of the changes to this city and the gossip from London. He rarely encounters the minions, less even the children of Mama Thames but Thomas and especially young Peter keep him supplied with news, never realising how far north he's carrying his gossip. He tells her of the trouble wrought by the spirit of riot and rebellion, in her turn she drops tempting hints of a thousand mysteries – the bells that rings in the deep, the creatures that do not swim though they look like fish, the tree whose roots reach back in time that the Vikings left behind, those flocks of soundless, flightless starlings - he longs to solve. There is work to be done in London, but soon he will go home for good to his river and another lifetime of mysteries to solve, together.

**Author's Note:**

> I came across an excellent photoset when I was writing this which I recommend if you want a proper flavour of Molendinar's world. http://www.flickr.com/photos/cycleologist/sets/72157607800581985/


End file.
